Unity
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Someone put this up on mastodon and it’s brilliant.
(For those of you who my not be familiar with the format, this is a typical ransomware screen seen by users when they get infected, but with the exact text of the Unity announcement in place of the normal informational paragraph.)
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Just unreal.
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Your reading is wrong, it’s not sales it’s installs. A user that has a gaming PC and a Steam Deck is going to be two installs. Same if a user buys a new PC and reinstalls the game on a new PC. I have multiple friends that have used Steam Family Library Sharing to share games with their kids. Each of those would be another install.
That might not be enough to push your example of 900,000 sales over the Pro/Enterprise threshold, but it becomes an increasing risk. Also because it’s lifetime installs all those press copies sent out before release count. Anything sold in early access during development counts. At some point one more secondary install that generates no revenue for the developer becomes a cost as it triggers install fees.
This is an apples to oranges comparison, Unity new policy is not charging you on $ at all, it’s based on installs, not sales or price per sale. Unreal’s policy is easy to predict, you can price it into your game and know how it will effect your finances relative to your revenue. Unity might seem less, and it might be less, but after you have crossed the thresholds you might just get a bill in a month with no sales and not know if it was piracy, a secondary install, a purchase that was not installed until months later. The amount Unity charges might be entirely divorced from the revenue of the company.
I don’t expect it’s very good for most game developers to be getting charged money that can’t really budget for, long after most sales of their last game have dried up, and their current game is only half done.
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epic comment.
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Could be their new marketing slogan.
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They already are. And this is another one of those situations where Unity would have to do a lot of remediation to get back to the status quo ante, if that’s even possible or something they care about doing.
As I see it, a lot of devs have been using Unity because it’s what you use. Big solid stable common platform that everyone else is using, so it must be the right thing. It wouldn’t be worth taking a backward step to whatever the alternatives are, because you’d be wasting time learning a new platform that might not even do what you need it to, why take the risk?
Well, now a lot of folk are trying the alternatives. And they will have a toe in those other engines, or will just shift over completely. Who cares if it’s a little less polished than Unity, if it means you don’t get retroactive licence changes and “fuck you pay us” demands out of the blue?
The damage has largely already been done. The rest depends on whether Unity can apply enough sticky-tape and glue to hold the ruins of their reputation together.
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yeah, everything you said is right. and this:
if unity is willing to do this now: what are they willing to do tomorrow? they’ve proven they’re willing to screw developers retroactively – no one can afford that kind of uncertainty
i posted an ars article about this the other day. their lawyers said this:
Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time… Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version.
i can imagine many hooks they might use for “agreement”: patches of the game, auto-updates of the engine used by the game, any service that the game uses ( ads, trophies, cloud saves. ), or terms of service for the end-user – and there’s some talk about how the tos has always referred to a much larger body of text that changed quite a while back…
you’re right it’s going to be a fight, but they must feel like they can win.
and while it plays out, who can risk it?
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I’ve seen a lot of people speculating about what Unity execs could possibly be thinking, are they just morons, etc. And I have no idea what the truth is.
But there is a possibility that I think gamers and game devs aren’t wrapping their heads around, which is that these executives could be destroying their company and platform on purpose. Private equity firms do this all the time: As long as you can extract a sufficiently large wad of cash over a defined time frame, it doesn’t matter if there’s a company left at the end of it. In fact, if you’re doing it right, there shouldn’t be.
I have no idea if that is the story here, but just because it would be despicable doesn’t mean it’s impossible. People will do pretty disgusting stuff for $100 million.
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This is a public company though. If there’s any sort of a paper trail, oh boy, there’s gonna be fun.
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IT IS.
And as some one mentioned elsewhere, I’ll just copy/paste it over:
Important things to note about the Unity engine fiasco:
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The CEO of Unity was the CEO of EA from 2007 to 2013, until he was forced to resign due to poor company performance.
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The CEO has been steadily selling off his stocks over the last year. He dumped 2000 shares just last week.
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In the last year, there have been 49 instances of insiders in the company selling their shares, and 0 instances of insiders buying. This indicates a negative internal view of the company future.
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Unity went IPO 3 years ago, and last year received $1 billion+ from venture capitalist investors.
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Most companies end their fiscal year in February. The beginning of this change is January 1st. All of this tells me a couple things. This decision was made almost entirely for short term profit. It is intended to pay back the investors. It is intended to do so with a “windfall” of income right before the end of the fiscal year, so that this year looks more successful for the company. The leadership of the company intends to cut and run after. This is everything that has been wrong with capitalism in the creative industry over the last few years, and with companies in general. This is short term greed with exactly no thought to their future. This is what happens when all you care about is making your next fiscal quarter look better than it did last year.
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Although CEOs are parasites whose interests don’t necessarily align with those of their companies, there’s also no need for conspiracies when rapacious idiocy will explain the situation. Unity’s been short on money lately and laying people off, after spending billions on acquiring companies - they’re hurting for money and doing something dumb for short-term profit (and damn the company’s long-term future) isn’t implausible. Especially when the CEO has form for suggesting self-defeating money-grubbing tactics.
Personally, in balance, although I don’t completely discount deliberate sabotage, I think the management being idiots seems the most likely. The chaos around the announcement and unanswered questions shows they clearly didn’t think through this decision and had huge blind spots about what the impact would be, and I suspect they’re experiencing some rude awakenings right now.
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the other explanation is that they don’t care.
sure this will likely kill their indie ecosystem but they might not even want that ecosystem. i imagine whatever they could eke from it would be slow and steady, take care and tending, none of which is what wall street likes.
they probably have some high risk ( and dumb ) pipedream that they preface with “move fast and break sh*t” and probably view all the rest as noise and dead weight
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I’ll believe it when I see it.
I don’t see how they’re going to regain trust at all.
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the ending bit seems like bad reporting:
The pushback got so severe that Unity offices in San Francisco and Austin had to close due to what it called a credible death threat
polygon reported three days ago it was an employee who made the threats
When officers arrived on scene, they met with a reporting party who informed them that an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media. The reporting party also said that the employee works at an out of state location for the company, but that they had been unable to reach the outside jurisdiction to make a report
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Unity also isn’t used just for games. It’s a way to build cross platform apps with some level of 3D graphics, game-like interactivity, or navigation.
A couple years ago I spent a bunch of time reverse engineering a very expensive robotic cat toy after the company that made it went out of business and delisted their companion app. (Effectively rendering it useless.) When I started trying to crack open the mobile app to understand more about its data structures and such, I was very surprised to discover it was actually Unity based.
It wasn’t really a game, but it used game-like navigation through its menus and utilized controller-like assets to interact with the device. On the upside, this also made it much easier to reverse engineer as there’s a ton of tools that specialize in extracting Unity assets and decompiling the .NET code to something more readable. I wasn’t interested in hacking the existing app so much as I was trying to understand its workings so I could create my own.
Between that, a ton of BLE sniffing, and reverse engineering the device firmware with Ghidra, I was able to create a few things that worked reasonably well. A mobile app, a MacOS app, and a standalone hardware device to control it without even needing a mobile phone by using an ESP32 and I2C-based controller. I gave up on the project when the original software showed up again in the App Store. But, it was a really cool learning experience.
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Yep, this is correct. We have a lot of Unity licenses where I work. We’re looking very carefully at our contract and trying to decide how we want to proceed. To be clear, these changes don’t affect us in the slightest, but we don’t think highly of companies that pull this sort of nonsense on their customers.
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Same. Risk mapping for Unity efforts will make some PMs a bit uncomfortable this week.
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Unity has a large office here in Brighton. I know several people who worked there, including one guy who quit, got tempted back with an offer of nearly double the salary, and then quit after a month upon realising that money doesn’t solve everything. The Brighton operation has been haemorrhaging staff over the last 18 months or so.
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